Overview

This microhistory reconstructs and analyses a protracted legal dispute over a small parcel of land called Warrens Court in Nibley, Gloucestershire, which was contested between successive generations of two families from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Employing a rich cache of archival material, Jason Peacey traces legal contestation over time and through a range of different courts, as well as in Parliament and the public domain, and contends that a microhistorical approach makes it possible to shed valuable light upon the legal and political culture of early modern England, not least by comprehending how certain disputes became protracted and increasingly bitter, and why they fascinated contemporaries. This involves recognising the dynamic of litigation, in terms of how disputes changed over time, and how those involved in myriad lawsuits found legal reasons for prolonging contestation. It also involves exploring litigants' strategies and practices, as well as competing claims about the way in which adversaries behaved, and incompatible expectations of the legal system. Finally, it involves teasing out the structural issues in play, in terms of the social, cultural, and ideological identities of successive generations. Ultimately, this dispute is employed to address important historiographical debates surrounding the nature of civil litigation in early modern England, and to provide new ways of appreciating the nature, severity, and visibility of political and religious conflict in the decades before and after the English Revolution.

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9780192897138

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Reviews

This is, then, a highly instructive study. * Keith Wrightson, The Seventeenth Century *

Author Information

Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL, which he joined in 2006, after working at the History of Parliament. He was educated at the universities of Lancaster, York, and Cambridge. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (2004) and of Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013), and he has published widely on politics and political culture in early modern Britain. He is currently researching Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century, as well as the history of citizenship in early modern England.

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